DEAD SIGNAL

One distress signal. One shared sector. Every clone brings ARK-9 closer to recovery.

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Inspiration

Reddit is strongest when many people gather around the same prompt, compare what happened, and change what comes next. We wanted one custom post to feel like a live operations room: quick enough to enter from the feed, deep enough to replay, and persistent enough that yesterday's community decision becomes today's playable consequence.

What it does

DEAD SIGNAL turns a Reddit custom post into ARK-9's daily shared recovery operation. Players deploy a fresh armored clone into the same seeded sector for a short portrait survival-action run. Movement is one-thumb or keyboard driven while weapons auto-acquire hostile shipforms. Runs recover data and salvage, produce comparable build records, and feed a shared reclamation campaign. The community chooses the next sector directive, and the winning risk-reward choice is designed to alter the next daily operation.

The action is intentionally readable on mobile, but the larger game belongs to the post: personal bests, streaks, daily rankings, clone records, shared milestones, and community choices give the subreddit a reason to return and talk about what happened.

How we built it

The visible game surface is built with Phaser 4.2.1. Intro, HUD, touch movement, upgrade choices, pause and mute controls, outcome screens, voting controls, motion, and feedback are Phaser canvas objects rather than HTML game UI. TypeScript contracts connect the Phaser client to Devvit Web 0.13.8 server routes and Redis-backed daily/community state. Phaser Editor 5 defines the scene and asset-pack boundary, and original PixelLab assets are tracked through a provenance and checksum workflow before they can ship.

Phaser features are selected only when they strengthen combat clarity, the distress-signal atmosphere, or mobile performance. Dense effects must degrade cleanly for reduced motion, lower performance tiers, and unsupported renderer capabilities.

Challenges

Reliable one-thumb input needs explicit gesture ownership: a movement drag must never accidentally select an upgrade, pause, mute, restart, or vote. The other central challenge is making the Reddit loop real rather than decorative: completed runs, shared state, rankings, and next-day directives must be observable from an actual public game post.

Originality and rights

DEAD SIGNAL uses an original name, world, characters, text, art direction, interface, and audio identity. It borrows the systems language of the survivors-like genre without copying protected expression from Vampire Survivors or another game. Shipped assets must have a documented rights basis and checksum.

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